Businessman on terror charge walks free

A London-based international businessman accused of trying to sell millions of pounds' worth of rocket launchers, missiles and rifles to terrorists walked free from the Old Bailey yesterday after the FBI refused to disclose key documents about its handling of the case.

Syed Mohsin Bukhari has spent 18 months in prison since he was arrested after a meeting at a central London hotel in 2002 with an undercover FBI officer posing as an agent for Farc, a Colombian guerrilla organisation.

At the meeting, which was secretly recorded, the 46-year-old businessman was said to have agreed to supply enough weapons to arm 1,000 soldiers, including missiles capable of bringing down aircraft.

The Crown Prosecution Service said yesterday it had applied for "public interest immunity" - gagging order - "not to disclose to the defence sensitive information". It dropped the case against Mr Bukhari after the trial judge, Stephen Kramer QC, ordered the documents to be disclosed. The jury formally returned a not guilty verdict.

Mr Bukhari's solicitor, Richard Hallam, said his client, who had been in custody since July 2004, was "delighted that his lack of involvement in any offence has now been made clear". He added: "Mr Bukhari was prosecuted under the Terrorism Act. At an early stage in this trial, the prosecution made it clear to the court that 'it is not the crown's case that the defendant was a terrorist sympathiser'." He added: "Mr Bukhari has always denied having committed any offence in relation to matters that were the subject of investigation from July 2002 onwards."

Mr Bukhari, a company director from Hendon, north London, was originally charged with two counts of conspiring to supply prohibited weapons - SA 18 missiles, rocket propelled grenades and AK47 rifles - between December 2002 and July 2004, and one count of conspiracy to commit terrorism. But after pre-trial hearings in December, at which the defence argued Mr Bukhari's conversations with the undercover FBI agent were "hocus pocus" and he had been illegally entrapped, the prosecution dropped the first two counts, leaving just the terrorism charge.

Jurors were told Mr Bukhari and his family were experienced illegal arms dealers and he had supplied surface to air missiles and helicopters worth £50m to Pakistan. But the defence maintained the deals were legitimate because until May 2004 it was not an offence to broker deals between third parties outside Britain.

The FBI began investigating Mr Bukhari after a tipoff in 1999 from an informant named Habib who said Mr Bukhari was close to a man called Ilyas Ali, who in turn was linked to a group in Peshawar, Pakistan, suspected of trafficking heroin and arms to the Taliban. The FBI also suspected Mr Bukhari of having close ties to Iran and Iraq. That October, the FBI officer, David Sullivan, posing as a Farc agent, met Mr Ali, who told him Mr Bukhari was looking to source tyres for Mirage jets for Iran.

At the meeting, Mr Sullivan gave Mr Ali an album of pictures of various weapons he had for sale, including M16 rifles, and told him to pass them on to Mr Bukhari in the hope they would lead the FBI to the "clients" in Pakistan.

The following June, Mr Ali was passing through London and handed Mr Bukhari the album. When Mr Bukhari was arrested in July 2004 and the National Crime Squad found the album in his garage in Hendon, it became a key plank of the prosecution's case. But during pre-trial hearings, Mr Bukhari's counsel, John Kelsy-Fry, argued the crown was relying on a "document [which] emanated from an undercover officer two or three years previously."